Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

The Graffitist Who Moved Indoors

The Barry McGee retrospective as it appeared in 2012 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.Credit
Sibila Savage

SAN FRANCISCO — “This is one of my favorite things to do,” Barry McGee said as he drove along the Bayshore Freeway on a glowering winter day, pointing out random patches of new graffiti. He was supposed to be talking about his traveling midcareer retrospective, which opens Saturday at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Instead, he was revisiting some of the places where he’d spent time in the late 1980s and early ’90s, as he rose to prominence as the graffiti artist known as Twist.

“That was the key, to have every rooftop in San Francisco,” Mr. McGee reminisced as he took an off-ramp down toward the industrial reaches of the Mission District, one of many places where he and his crew once tagged the road, safety barriers and every visible roof below. “It seems completely ridiculous now,” he said, laughing, “but then it was the most important thing.”

Since those days, the whole South of Market area, once known for its seediness, has been redeveloped, gentrified. Mr. McGee had to drive past several blocks of trendy loft buildings before finding a slice of ruined waterfront that resembled the streets he once roamed. He finally stopped at a crumbling warehouse by the bay.

As he searched for an entrance, Mr. McGee recalled that he and his friends had once plastered that building and others many times over with writing and drawings. “It’s the last square mile of San Francisco that’s like this,” he said. “You feel it closing in, though.”

Mr. McGee, 46, seemed to be talking about more than real estate. For more than two decades he has worked in two worlds: that of graffiti art, where he’s still revered though no longer openly active, and that of museums and galleries, where his street-culture-inspired installations, often featuring kinetic sculptures, Op-Art-inflected abstractions and finely wrought depictions of sad-sack bums, have flourished.

Since 1991, when he finished his B.F.A. at the San Francisco Art Institute, Mr. McGee has created installations at scores of well-known venues, from the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and Deitch Projects in New York to the Carnegie International and the Venice Biennale expositions. Now his career itself seems on the brink of gentrification, starting with the retrospective, which opened in August at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. “Barry is arguably the most internationally influential artist who lives in the Bay Area,” said Lawrence Rinder, the museum’s director, who said he mounted the show because it was time “to look at the development of his themes and modalities.”

There’s a smaller show, too, opening on Sunday at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, featuring three new installations. Next September, Mr. McGee will make his debut with the blue-chip Chelsea gallery Cheim & Read, better known for representing the estates of Joan Mitchell and Louise Bourgeois.

“Barry doesn’t need to be in a gallery that will put him into a program of street art,” said Mr. McGee’s primary dealer, Chris Perez, the owner of Ratio 3 gallery in San Francisco. “That’s a context he’s entirely uninterested in.”

Yet Mr. McGee, gentle and tending toward self-deprecation, seems on the fence. On the one hand, he’ll say, “I’m definitely too old to be talking about graffiti, that’s for sure.” But on the other: “I’m glad it’s over,” he said of the Berkeley show. “I’m not sure I like the attention.”

Later, leafing through the show’s catalog, he asked: “Should we really go through it? Is that weird?”

He spoke in a half-genuine, half-joking way that made it hard to tell whether he was really bothered. “I hate this catalog more than anything in the world,” he said. “I’d love to spray-paint over areas.”

Jenelle Porter, the senior curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, who is organizing the Boston show, said: “Barry likes to keep his feet in both worlds and yet is conflicted about that, I think. He has an interesting kind of situation to straddle that other contemporary artists don’t, in that it’s important for his work to maintain credibility for a younger audience, as well as all the collectors who are buying his work.”

Prices for that work range from $15,000 for a diptych to $300,000 for an installation. “It’s very tricky to manage something like that,” Ms. Porter added. “You just have more people with more expectations.”

But perhaps the person with the biggest expectations is Mr. McGee himself.

He grew up in South San Francisco, the child of a Chinese-American secretary and an Irish-American father who worked in auto body shops and collected junked hot rods. As a teenager, he was fascinated by the anarchic tactics of the Bay Area’s activist groups, some of which were spray-painting anti-government slogans on banks and underpasses. (Unsurprisingly, one of his favorite words is “radical.”)

A friend introduced him to graffiti and Mr. McGee, who had “always drawn,” said his creative life took off. “It was really empowering,” he said. “I really thought I was doing art on the street.”

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Meanwhile, his talent for drawing was so clear that his high school art teacher suggested he think hard about making art his life. That’s roughly how Mr. McGee ended up, several community colleges later, on a scholarship at the San Francisco Art Institute.

“I knew about what was going on on the street,” he said. “I knew how to draw. But I didn’t know how art worked at all.”

He steeped himself in everything: painting, printmaking, installation art, even video and performance. He was fascinated by Philip Guston’s cartoonish figures and the labor-intensive projects of Ann Hamilton, but less thrilled by the 1980s bad boy painters from New York, like David Salle, who were frequent visitors to the school. “Everything was, like, done on canvas, and it was shown in galleries and it was exchanged for money,” Mr. McGee said. “To me, it wasn’t that radical.”

What was radical was Mr. McGee’s graffiti. By the early 1990s it had blossomed, according to Darryl Smith and Laurie Lazer of the Luggage Store, a San Francisco nonprofit gallery, to encompass artfully spray-painted portrayals of struggling humanity, like crawling, sad-eyed men. In 1992, they invited Mr. McGee to create what Ms. Lazer believes to have been his first “permissional” graffiti project. A rendering of three wind-filled shirts, it remained on the building’s roll-down gate until the city’s anti-graffiti force buffed it out by mistake.

Projects with Yerba Buena in San Francisco, the Drawing Center in New York and other nonprofits followed. Then came museums, like the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, where Mr. McGee had his first solo show at a major museum in 1998. As his projects moved indoors, he began adding more elements: wall assemblages made with rusty printer’s trays or overlapping clusters of framed signs, drawings and paintings — a weirdly biomorphic take on the minimalist grid. For a time, he bought empty liquor bottles from Mission District bums, covered them with portraits, and massed them on walls.

Mr. McGee’s shows typically incorporate work by his friends and fellow taggers. “As soon as there’s a hole in the fence,” he said, “everyone goes through.”

In 1999, Mr. McGee finally agreed to show with the now-defunct Deitch Projects, a commercial gallery in New York. Soon, his shows included more elaborate elements, like overturned vans, video monitors, animatronic sculptures of life-size graffiti taggers. They drew huge crowds — and sometimes, the police.

Together with those of other San Francisco street artists, like Margaret Kilgallen and Chris Johanson, they sparked a frenzy for San Francisco street art, retroactively called the Mission School, that Mr. McGee now regrets.

“I try to pretend like I had nothing to do with any of that,” he said. “As soon as street art got popular, I was just like, ‘I’m out of here.’ ”

Along the way, he married Ms. Kilgallen, known for paintings and installations that recall American folk art and signs. She died of breast cancer in 2001, less than a month after giving birth to their daughter, Asha. Mr. McGee now lives with Asha and his second wife, the artist and musician Clare Rojas, in a modest house in Dogpatch, a gentrifying San Francisco neighborhood near those ramshackle warehouses that were his first workplaces. “My family means everything to me,” he said.

That’s mostly why Mr. McGee has pulled back on graffiti. “I just don’t have time, either,” he said. “It’s really hard at a certain age to keep up that lifestyle.”

But that hasn’t stopped him from being drawn to, what is for him, an even more transgressive idea. He is possessed by the thought of making a show that will fit the walls of a white cube space, and maybe even making paintings on canvas.

“There’s four canvases over there that I’ve had for probably over 12 years,” he said, pointing to the back of his studio, which is stacked with surfboards, photos and broken video equipment as well as artworks. “I don’t know if it’ll ever happen.”

But right now, “I want to do just, like, regular art,” he said. “Whatever is made today on canvas goes up against all of art history. It’s the most radical thing.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 31, 2013, on Page AR20 of the New York edition with the headline: The Graffitist Who Moved Indoors. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe